Categories
jAlbum Turtle skin

Building Panoramic albums with Turtle

Building panoramic galleries is not fully supported by most of the web album tools today. You need to have some panning tool to be able to conveniently handle these extreme-wide photos. In Turtle 3.2.0 I have introduced some new techniques to support this.

The swipe control has been extended to let users pan panoramic images horizontally and trigger the switch for next (previous) photo only when the right edge gets below the 90% of the window width. The left and right arrows on the keyboard can also be used to pan left and right until you reach the far end, when it falls back to the original previous (next) picture functionality. But a working example is worth a thousand words according to the ancient Chinese wisdom. Click the image below to test it “in vivo”.

Use the Left and Right arrow buttons to pan through, or move the image with the mouse, or simply swipe left and right on touch devices.

Here are the settings I’ve changed:

  • Images → Image bounds → Thumbnails = 890×120, Images = 9000×600
  • Turtle → Design → Stick controls to top = on
  • Turtle → Design → Border width = 0
  • Turtle → Header> → Theme image size = 900×160
  • Turtle → Header → Show "Start slideshow" = off
  • Turtle → Thumbnails → Reduce thumbs on image pages = 1/4
  • Turtle → Thumbnails → Place thumbnail captions = Below
  • Turtle → Thumbnails → Thumbnail caption = ${comment}
  • Turtle → Images → Transition = Cross-fade
  • Turtle → Images → After the last image = Start over
  • Turtle → Images → Transition = Cross-fade
  • Turtle → Sharing, Maps, Photo data – to taste

The rule of thumb for thumbnails is to use the width of the Theme image – 10px. For the images it is essential to specify a width wide enough to cater for all images, and control the final dimensions with the height parameter, e.g. 600px here.

The great thing about this that you don’t have change anything if you want to add panorama photo mixed in with the “normal” pictures. If you don’t want to tamper with the original album setting just add maxImageWidth 10000 in Edit mode → User variables (right bottom corner), in case of an album made previously. This will only affect the new photo.

I hope you’ll put this feature to good use, and I can see beautiful panoramic albums proliferating in the future.